Monty at AOSHQ has a strong post up this morning:

The torturer’s horse knows nothing of the cruelty of its master; it is simply a dumb beast. It exists only in the moment. It is a creature of the eternal present. To the horse there is no past or future, no regret but no real happiness either. There is only the temporal relief of scratching an itch, a relief completely forgotten moments later. When the torturer mounts to go home after his dreadful work, the horse will bear him without complaint. The torturer’s horse bears no moral burden for its master’s work because it has no moral sense — no soul.

Human beings do have souls, and thus do bear moral burdens. The torturer is a moral monster in a way his horse is not and cannot be. The difference lies in free will. A human can choose his path, and must bear the consequences (moral and otherwise) of that choice.

For the left, empathy and sympathy often eclipse morality entirely. It’s not a cliche to say that most leftists are governed by their feelings, for this is observably the case. To most of the left — becoming more pronounced the further left ideologically you go — the moral sense is atrophied to near-uselessness. The left has come to view morality with a deadly kind of skepticism, a postmodern cultural-relativist suspiciousness that shrinks and shrivels the moral sense. Empathy and sympathy reign supreme. To a person of the left, “right” and “wrong” exist not as moral poles, but as emotional ones: what’s right is what feels right, in the moment.

But when decision-making is driven by in-the-moment emotion, consequences are often ignored. We see this all the time from “activists” on the left. They act without thinking of the consequences, which are often harmful to the very people they claim to want to help. They are governed by their passions.

A classic example of this behavior is the banning of the chemical DDT. One of the most effective treatments for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, DDT was banned based on largely-unfounded concerns about the environment (empathy for Mother Gaia, you see). Yet in the years since, millions of actual human beings have been killed or damned to a life of suffering by malaria, a disease that could have been easily curtailed with DDT. Empathetic leftists could preen that a “dangerous” chemical was banned while millions of actual human beings (most of them poor and black) suffer and die.

I’ve wondered for years why the left continues to engage in this observably-harmful behavior. Surely if they empathize with the poor, the downtrodden, the hungry, and the repressed, they wouldn’t do anything to deliberately hurt those very people…would they? Yet, time after time, this is exactly what happens.

This is something that Joe has noted here.

We have talked about Hobbes many times.

We have also talked about the nature of collectivism and how it embodies control and selfishness:

Collectivism argues that it can beat human nature – that we need only to replace antiquated notions of principle, natural law and spirituality with the concepts of materialism, science and reason. Since Man is the most powerful entity, Man can force (coerce) reality to conform to our plans.

But the reality is that no form of collectivism can overcome the human ego or human spirit.

None.

There is only one force in heaven and on earth that can – and the existence of that supernatural entity is not recognized by collectivists. They prefer materialism over spiritualism, service to each other as dictated by the state rather than service to each other as commanded by the heart. Whether you think this to be a myth or not, there is only one force that was powerful enough for one man to allow himself to be crucified for the sins of all mankind – it is the same spirit that causes a mother or a father to step in front of a danger to a child, a police officer to step in front of a bullet to protect a citizen or a soldier to jump on a grenade or an IED to save his buddies.

Curiously this concept is found in the Christian Holy Bible, John Chapter 15, and verse 13:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

In the history of the modern world, there has only been one earthly system, albeit an imperfect one, that has even come close to lassoing the human ego, shoving a bit in its mouth and putting a saddle on it…and that system just happens to have been built upon that supernatural spirit that collectivists will deny even exists.

That system is the American Republic and the free market and Constitution that it is based on. We sometimes (OK, often) gripe about the status of our electoral politics and its whipsaw effect as we get yanked back and forth between two competing major ideologies and theories of governance. But that is the way it was designed – only free men can choose to collectivize when it suits their purpose and benefits them – and then dissolve that collective relationship. The fact that we do have choices like this leads to changes in government and those changes are the very safety valve that prevents too much human ego to infiltrate governance.

If we adhere to the Constitution and its theory of constrained federal government, you will never see a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Lenin or a Mao in America.

Never.

But we aren’t adhering to the Constitution. We are moving farther and farther away. We are allowing “experts” in government to make decisions for us on those “mundane things” that have to get done. The more we move the slider over to the “more government” left side, the more we introduce the concepts of planning, of dictatorship, of coercion and yes, of ego, back into the equation, making it possible for us to create a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Lenin or a Mao.

This is why Hayek understood this to be true:

Democratic socialism…is simply not achievable.